Cinematic Virtual Reality With Motion Parallax From a Single Monoscopic Omnidirectional Image

Complementary advances in the fields of virtual reality (VR) and reality capture have led to a growing demand for VR experiences that enable users to convincingly move around in an environment created from a real-world scene. Most methods address this issue by first acquiring a large number of image samples from different viewpoints. However, this is often costly in both time and hardware requirements, and is incompatible with the growing selection of existing, casually-acquired 360-degree images available online. In this paper, we present a novel solution for cinematic VR with motion parallax that instead only uses a single monoscopic omnidirectional image as input. We provide new insights on how to convert such an image into a scene mesh, and discuss potential uses of this representation. We notably propose using a VR interface to manually generate a 360-degree depth map, visualized as a 3D mesh and modified by the operator in real-time. We applied our method to different real-world scenes, and conducted a user study comparing meshes created from depth maps of different levels of accuracy. The results show that our method enables perceptually comfortable VR viewing when users move around in the scene.